Only a few of the otherwise copious writers of that time make mention of this despised portion of the army; yet there are sufficient accounts, from which we may conclude that great influence was produced by the baggage-train on the fate of the army and the country. Especially by the enormous extent of it. At the end of the sixteenth century Adam Junghans reckons, that in a besieged fortress where the camp-followers were reduced to the smallest possible number, to three hundred infantry soldiers, there were fifty women and forty children, besides sutlers, horseboys, &c., &c., somewhat more than a third of the soldiers. But in the field the proportion was quite different even in the beginning of the war. Wallhausen reckons as indispensable to a German regiment of infantry, four thousand women, children, and other followers. A regiment of three thousand men had at least three hundred waggons, and every waggon was full to repletion of women, children, and plundered goods; when a company broke up from its quarters, it was considered an act of self-denial if it did not carry away with it thirty or more waggons. At the beginning of the war a regiment of north German soldiers, three thousand strong, started from the muster-place where it had remained some time, followed by two thousand women and children. From that time the baggage-train continued increasing to the end of the war. It was only for a brief space of time that great commanders, like Tilly, Wallenstein, and Gustavus Adolphus were able to diminish this great plague of the army. In 1648, at the end of the great war, the Bavarian General, Gronsfeld, reports that in the Imperial and Bavarian armies there were forty thousand soldiers who drew war rations, and a hundred and forty thousand who did not; on what were these to subsist if they did not obtain their food by plunder, especially as in the whole country where the army encamped, there was not a single place where a soldier could buy a bit of bread. In the year 1648 the camp-followers were more than three times the number of the fighting-men. These numbers tell more significantly than any deductions, what a dreadful amass of misery surrounded these armies. Before we proceed to describe the influence which armies thus composed exercised upon the life of the German people, we must once more remind the reader, that this monstrous evil was not created by the Thirty years' war, but for the most part already in existence. Some observations will therefore be here introduced from the above-quoted and now rare little book, written by Adam Junghans von der Olnitz, at that period when the worth and capacity of the old Landsknecht army passed away into the wild dissolute life of mercenaries. It appears here as the prologue to the monstrous tragedy which began twenty years later.